Marketing Planning free essay sample

Assessment 3: individual reflective essay Introduction The purpose of this article is to analyze and explore the characteristics of the marketing plan. Firstly, it will identify the role and nature of marketing plan. Secondly, it will outlines the structure of the marketing plan. Moreover, the paper will determines the each elements in the marketing plan and the linkage between these elements. Additionally, the two misconceptions will be examined. Last, it will conclude the marketing plan is indispensable to the organizations. Role and Nature of Marketing Plan Marketing plan is a business document that describes the marketing environment, outlines the marketing objectives, analysis current position of business and organize its marketing strategy, details actions of business to achieve the organizations goals. A business plan is the document that provide description of business structure and model, used to detail plans for business, identify goals and strategies, help organizations achieve the result and measure organizations performance. We will write a custom essay sample on Marketing Planning or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Moreover, It can help company determines the development of business in the future, and prepared for the problems and opportunities, also required for the business financing and written to target potential investors. Since the business continuing change with macro environment and customer demand, marketing plan is a key section which involved in the overall business plan. The marketing plan and business plan are interdependent, and complement each other, both of them are essential parts of successful business. According to Abrams (1993), business plan provide a blueprint to marketing plan. The business plan describes the business goals and the reason for formed the organization. Meanwhile, the marketing plan guide the implementation by organizations marketing department, explains how organization will achieve the goals. If the business plans changes, the actions for the new plans, which included in marketing plans also make changes. Therefore, the set of marketing plans always need meet the business objectives. Normally, there are two types of marketing plan, strategical planning and tactical planning. Strategical planning can define as the organizations resource and capabilities matched by upper managerial decision process to its market opportunities for long-term goals. On the other hand, tactical planning is the execution of lower management of marketing plan to achieve the short-term goals. Both of them must incorporated in the marketing plan to ensure the successful of the companies. In tactically, marketing plan set the expectation of activities of various functional areas of the organization, such as marketing, finance, plant facilities and personnel, and provide the actual actions and information for the activities to ensure achieve the objectives. For example, company advertising goods for particular market and improve the brand image. The tactical marketing plan emphasize on guide the current operation of functional parts of the firm in short range. In strategically, marketing plan used for set the overall goals for organization in long term. The marketing plan provide the information, to assist company target the markets, define the organizational objectives, and clarify the specific performance goals in the future. For instance, the companies can clearly understand what important to their customers, and then set the strategies to meet objectives. Furthermore, It also outlines the weaknesses, strengthens and the competitors within the organizations, such as customer feedback information, competitive Intelligence. Additionally, the marketing plan can facilitate the top management decision making, lower the risks for taking next steps of business, and make the decisions more effective. Structure of Marketing Plan The typically structure of Marketing Plan consist of four stages, which are perform the situation analysis, set up marketing objectives, develop marketing strategies and implementation and control of marketing plan. The first stage is organization perform a situation analysis of marketing environment. The situation analysis will outline the specific organizations oal, and define the potential customers, competitors and distributors. In addition, It also identifies the factors of internal and external environment that support or hinder the organizations objectives, and ensures the market planning effectively. Moreover, the SWOT analysis applied to the situation analysis process, which can identifies strength, weakness, opportunity and threats of the company. The second stage of develop a marketing plan is set marketing objectives. The management will set the market objectives after understanding the market environment, business weakness and strength. The marketing objectives indicate what marketing function must accomplish on behalf of the organization(Solomon, 2012). Marketing objective is different from the organization objective planned in first step, as the marketing objectives are more specific focus on the brand image, sizes, sales, products. Meanwhile, the organization objectives state overall operations of organization. Once define the marketing objectives, the marketing strategies can be develop. Therefore, the third stage is develop marketing strategies. In this marketing planning process, managers must choose the target markets and positioning their products in the markets at first, and then they will develop the marketing mix strategies to support the expectation position of theirs products in the market. In this view, market strategy is different from the marketing plan, because the market strategy set the entire direction and objectives for marketing, but marketing plan outlines the specific actions for the implementation of the market strategy to achieve the marketing objectives. The last stage is implement and control the marketing plan. To implement the marketing strategies, management must decide what level of marketing expenditures is necessary to actually achieve the marketing objectives(Solomon, 2012). The projected budget for marketing need to distribute reasonable among the marketing activities and tools in the marketing mix (Kotler, 1988). Furthermore, the companies need control tools to catch the poorly implementation or bias marketing mix to making sure that activities are not fall off the goals. Elements of the Marketing Plan As the marketing plan structure consists of four parts, there are several elements in each part make up the marketing plan. In the process of perform situation analysis, The organization should analysis both internal and external environment by adopt SWOT analysis. The analysis of internal and external environment are relative independence but cannot deal separately, both of them have pervasive effect on the organizations decisions. and managers will use SWOT analysis to identify the internal and external factors that influence the marketing strategy. Internal environment refers to the controllable elements existing within the organization that affect its performance either positively or negatively, which including facilities, employees,financial stability, organizational cultures,missions, technologies and many other factors. The purpose of internal analysis is conducted based the resources, capability of the organization, understand the organization in depth. The resources can classified as tangible resources, intangible resources and human resource. The tangible resources are easy to identify and evaluate, such as physical facilities and financial resource. Secondly, the intangible resources which can become the competitive advantages over periods, like brand image and technologies. And the human resources refers to the skills, ability and knowledge of the employees that contribute to the organization. Furthermore, the information of organizational capabilities is used to refer to the firm’s capacity for undertaking specific productive activities. Additionally, the SWOT analysis applied to the internal environment identify the key strength and weakness of organization. It ties the strength and weakness of organization to customer requirement, reminding management customer satisfaction are always the most important, and assist the firm to make adjustment to meeting needs of its target market. On the other hand, external environment made of factors outside the organization that positive or negative affect the organizations performance. In this section, managers can conduct four type of analysis, which are customer analysis, competitive analysis, market analysis and environmental analysis. Those analysis can identify all the external factors that have effect on the organization. For example, customer analysis can investigate the customer need and buy motivation; Competitive analysis can identify competitors strategies, objectives and performance; Market analysis state the profitability, entry barriers of the target market; Environmental analysis evaluate the technology, sociological trends and demographic. These external environmental factors are uncontrollable, but managers can respond to them by planning. In this section, the SWOT analysis also applied to this section, which examines the opportunity and threats of the organization. The opportunities may caught by managers and lead the company benefit from them, make the company growth. While, the identified threats which negatively affect the organization may avoided by managers planning. Next, the process of set the marketing objectives is the important segment in marketing plan. The objectives can be established must behind the managers have thorough understanding of the marketing environment. Once the organization builded up the marketing objectives, then organization can development the marketing strategies to achieve the marketing objectives. In the process of develop marketing strategies, it consist of select the target markets and develop marketing mix strategies. The company select the best suitable markets that have greatest possibility to achieve the market objectives. And then, managers make the decisions about activities towards objectives by using the marketing mix tools, and the elements of marketing mix are product, price, promotion and place. All of four elements cannot separately, must be viewed as whole and support each other in the marketing structure; Otherwise marketing strategies for organization will be disorder and uncoordinated. Furthermore, the four elements have sequence for decision making ,the product strategies determined by market objectives, because the products features must designed to satisfy the target customers. In addition, the pricing of product have many conditions, the basic rule is the ricing must expensive than the cost, and the different goods have different prices in different places, thus pricing strategy determined by product strategy and supply chain strategy. Moreover, pricing strategy determine promotion strategy, like managers use pricing strategy that deliver the message to the specific target customers in the promotional strategy. And the supply chain strategies may depend on all of others strategies. As the product is the fundamental part for company making profit, organization should develop product strategies carefully. Product mix strategy is determine what product features and designs will appeal to the organizations target market. The product strategies including the product attribute decisions, branding strategies, packaging, labeling, and services. Moreover, The product life cycle is applied to the managers, which indicates the change of markets response to the products over its life, and product life cycle can assists mangers develop product strategies effectively. Secondly, the pricing strategy decides how much for the products that provide for the customers. Since price is the only element in marketing strategy that create revenue for organization, all the others elements are cost, its clearly a important determinant of achieving objectives(Woof, 2011). In this section, organization need the information that may influence the pricing form the prior analysis, such as economy, customer demand, competition. Then, company choose different pricing strategy for depends on these factors and the result of both product and distribution strategy. Such as cost based, retailer and wholesaler demand based, competition based,customer needs based. The marketing mix pricing can help managers setting the price strategy as a market tool, like wholesale prices, retail price, price skimming. Next, the organization develop promotional strategy after complete the pricing strategy. Promotional strategies state how managers communicate the value of the product with the target market. The purpose of promotional strategy is encourage customers buy products or raise awareness of the product to achieve marketing objectives. In this section, organization required develop the products message and use three models of marketing ommunication to deliver message to the customers, which are one to one, one to many and many to many models, such as personal selling, direct marketing and so on. For example, advertising is type of one-to-many model, and its the most common way that organization communication with customers. However, there are many bias and cheated information existing in the advertising, and the customer perceive of the advertising is commonly untruthful and deceptive, which may have negatively effect on the organizational promotion. Last, as the place is the only element that may give organization long-term competitive advantages, managers should have patience on deal the supply chain strategies. The supply chain strategies refers to when and where to make the product available to the customers, and the purpose of supply chain strategy is lower the operational cost and maximizing the efficiencies of the organization, a good supply chain strategy can create value for the organization. Meanwhile, it can establish the relationship between the organization and customers, For example, Ikea delegate the distribution function to the customers, offer them the choice which is picking up the items in the store, that may save shipping charge for the customer. Furthermore, as the globalization, more and more organization choose to sell the products through the retailers, and become the global brand can make more profit. If the organization choose sell the products through retailers and wholesalers, the managers need consider the product, pricing, and promotion decisions for choosing the retailers. Although the supply chain strategy make organization more competitive, Nonetheless, there still have ethical dilemma issue, which is slotting allowance, a fee force charged by the manufactures to large retailers( Solomon, 2012). The last stage for marketing plan is implement and control. In this stage, implementation links the developed marketing strategies with marketing performance, and summarize the budget and timelines for the activities from the previous section. In the process of implementation, it consist of four elements. The action plans detail how the marketing strategies will be implemented by the managers, including responsibility of individuals, scheduled activities, total budget, and measurement and control to ensure the objectives actually achieved. To implement the plans, all the information of marketing objectives and strategies are needed, also the organizations should clarify the tasks and performance of each management ,in order to avoid the confusing on individual responsible. Besides, the timeline allocate the reasonable time to each activities for achieve the objectives. The timeline can help managers understand if tactics driving any sales(William, 1978). Furthermore, organization should check the budgets usually, a effectively schedule and monitor make the activities progress easy to monitor, once the time line not matched, and the budget cost overrun, the managers can adjust the plan immediately. Finally, managers must ensure the effectively measurement and control to determine what level that the organization actually meet the marketing goals, and acting flexible, adjustment the strategies or objectives on the basis of this analysis if necessary. Nevertheless, the marketing plan may be not reliable due to the many reasons, such as the mix up of tactics and strategies, poor implementation, not widely accepted marketing plan structure and so on. If organization faced those problems, may be need find out the problem and fix it or redo the marketing plan. The research and trend analysis may applied to the control process. The research refers to the organization conduct continuous market research to understand their brand position among target markets, and trend analysis can examine sales by geographic area,distributor, chain and reseller type. Obviously, these techniques help management more effective on decision making and ensure the quality of decisions. Assumptions There have many misconceptions made in relation to the market plan in the market. According to the Andereck (2005), The most common one is managers always think they know what theirs customers want . Many managers never conduct the customer analysis to research what is customers truly want and demands in the internal environment, because they think they understand customers, but actually is not. always. However, In the marketing plan, the SWOT analysis used to identify the organizations weakness and strengths , and make adjustment to meet the customers needs and requirement, which indicate how important the customers demands to the rganizations. Therefore, its crucial to managers understand the customers, and research the customers demands should be the first task for managers job. Additionally, some managers think if they advertising, its mean they have a marketing plan( Ali, 2001). Which thought is totally wrong. Advertising activity is one of the marketing promotional strategies, its one to many model, and can spread to the market quickly, give positively effec t on organizational promotion. However, it’s only a tactic, which is one of the many ways that deliver the product messages to the target customers. Organization must have an integrated plan that enable produce many tactics and conduct the situation analysis to understand the customers needs, then complete the marketing product, pricing and supply chain strategies. Finally, managers can use these tactics corporate the previous information to implement the promotional strategies to achieve the marketing objectives. Conclusion This report has analyzed the role, nature, structure, elements of marketing plan, and the links exist between each elements of a marketing plan. Moreover, the article also provide the common misconception made relate to the marketing plan. In overall, the marketing plan is a essential tool for the managers, and provided detailed direction for the organizations. If the marketing plan planned by managers or marketers step by step, carefully evaluated and researched, it will assist the organization to achieve the marketing objectives, and help them make decisions effectiveness. Reference list Abrams, Rhonda M. (1993). The Successful Business Plan: Secrets Strategies. Oasis Press. Ali,Moi. (2001). Marketing Effectively. New York. Dorling Kindersley. Andereck, Ph. D. ,Kathleen. (2005). Marketing Plan Outlineprovidedto AOT. Unpublished. Cohen, William A. (1991). The Practice of Marketing Management. New York: Macmillan. Kotler, (1988) Marketing Management analysis, planning, implementation, and control. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey. Mullins, J. , Walker, O. and Harper Boyd Jr. , H. 2009), Marketing Management: A Strategic Decision-Making Approach, 7th Edition, McGraw Hill, Australia and New Zealand. Solomon, M. R. Marshall, G. W. Stuart, E. W. (2012). Marketing: Real People Real Choices (7th edn), Pearson Education Inc. , Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA. William H. Brannen. (1978). Small business marketing: a selected and annotated bibliography. American Marketing Association Woof, M. B. (2011) The Marketing Plan Handbook, (4th edn), Pearson Education Inc. , Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA.